Sky
by Auditory Eden
Summary: A Guardian Angel isn't a person. To call them by that label is pinioning a bird, caging their very essence. Sora/Kairi, AU


Author: AuditoryEden

Rating: T

Warnings: Mentions of sex

Notes: Inspired by the summary of the fourteen chapter story "12", which is floating around in the completed stories somewhere. I just felt I could improve on the concept.

Sky

Kairi had a lot of people in her life. Her adoptive parents, her sister, her best friend, her cousin, her dog...The list could go on and on. It did go on and on. But for almost her whole life, there was never any one person in her life that _was_ her life, except for a brief stint in her first year of high school, when she had dated a young man on the basketball team. Many people thought she was simply too dedicated to her career, or that she was happy being single, or asexual, or lesbian.

The truth was that there was never any one _person_ whom she loved.

But a guardian angel doesn't count as a _person_.

A guardian angel is so much more than a person, that to call one by that name is an insult, the highest and rudest. It is to contain them and tear off their wings. It is to desecrate their very essence and destroy that which makes them what they are.

No, Kairi never loved a person, but that is not to say she didn't love.

When asked at five, who her best friend was, Kairi would always tell you, "Thirteen." This didn't mean much to most people, including her parents. It was simply assumed that Kairi was a math-talented child. Kairi, however, could have waxed poetic about Thirteen's soft, steel-grey feathered wings, his laugh, and the odd way his hair shot from his head.

A few years later, at seven, Kairi could read and write. She stopped calling her "imaginary friend" Thirteen, and began calling him "Z". This pronunciation, she explained to him one day, came from the way he wrote his own name: XIII. Pronounced like a words, Xiii, his name was Zee, or Z. Z was always amused by this.

When Kairi turned nine, if you asked her who her best friend was, she would no longer reply, "Thirteen", or even "Z". Her new best friend was called Yuffie, and she was in Kairi's grade.

XIII was alright with this. Every child grew older, abandoned their angel, and developed human friends. He'd seen so many other angels loose their children, he was braced and ready when it began to happen to his Kairi. But unlike other children, who soon began to forget that their angels really existed, Kairi still spoke to him.

She had rationalized her switch of best friends to him one day. "I told Kaa-san about you, and she said it's not normal for my best friend to be a boy who's older than me. So now you can be my nii-san, and Yuffie-chan is my best friend."

And he was older than her. For one thing, he looked consistently two years older than her, so when she was four, he looked six, and so on down the line, but he was also about a hundred years older than her in reality. That difference had to do with learning to be a guardian. He told her, sometimes, about his apprenticeship, when he was shuffled around by different guardians, all of whom thought he was clearly too soft to be among their ranks. When one boy had left his angel, forgotten her in a matter of weeks, Sora had felt like crying for the angel, who'd been expecting it to happen.

Kairi had sworn she'd never forget him. She followed through with that promise faithfully. At twelve, when most kids were disposing of the last reminders of their true childhoods, Kairi clung to hers. She slept in his arms and the warm cocoon of his soft wings, and held his hands whenever they were alone. She had, by now, established that Z was not actually a being she could tell others about. A guardian angel, not a person, not a thing, not a creature, just a pure consciousness that only she would ever know truly embodied. He was the one soul she could always confide in, could always speak to. He held her through tears and trauma. When she broke her arm just before her thirteenth birthday, Z had cradled her head with his invisible hands, comforting her, as the arm was X-rayed, set, and put in a cast. He kissed away her tears, and the night after the cat was put on, he cradled her even more tightly than usual, in their shared shelter of silver feathers.

As the years went by, a child's angel grew with them. Sora had begun his career as a guardian in the shape of a two-year old with small, downy wings a pure white and a messy head of brown hair. His mind, of course, was the same as it had been before, but children trusted no one better than other children, and were awed by no one more than slightly older children. If an adult-shaped guardian told their child not to walk off a bridge, that child would be a goner. But if a child-shaped guardian told their child not to walk off a bridge, that child would live another day. When Kairi was a tender six, Sora was a laughing boy of eight, his wings reaching from the top of his head to the floor beneath his feet when they were folded tightly against his back. The feathers were longer, and darkened to steel-grey. When she was thirteen, he was fifteen, a little gawky, tall and thin. His wings were shot with a burnished bronze at the tips of the feathers now. Kairi always played them between her fingers in the mornings, when she wasn't quite awake, and likened them to Icarus' wings. Those wings ensconced her when she was stuck, sitting alone at her lunch table when Yuffie had gone to sit with her boyfriend, a guy in their class called Leon.

When she was fifteen, Z was a rugged and deeply attractive seventeen, his wings now almost totally bronze colored. Kairi was very good-looking as well, and was asked out by a junior, her freshman year of high school.

Riku was a heartthrob. He was strong, smart, well-mannered, and he never tried to seduce his girlfriends into bed. He had long, soft silver hair and green cat's eyes, well muscled, tall, and well tanned. Kairi was head over heals for him, or so she thought.

Z had dealt with it. This guy was, physically, the same age he was. Z took to observing those around Kairi, instead of Kairi herself, especially when she was with her boyfriend. Yuffie, he noticed, was having problems with Leon, her boyfriend of two years. She'd sometimes call him Vincent, and then start crying. Leon, presumably, knew what the problem was, because he always comforted her and wiped away her tears. Z felt for them both, and felt torn inside when Kairi would smile just for him, in the way that she still did, or curl up in his arms at night.

But then, Kairi had lost Riku. Not to a girl, but to the very reason he never seduced a girl into bed.

Riku, it turned out, was very in love with one of the teacher interns, a young man in his second year of college. In short, Riku never seduced a girl because he had no formed interest in them—what Riku wanted was guys.

It was a blow to her, but Kairi dealt with it, and retreated back into the arms of the angel who had never abandoned her, even when she didn't seem to need him. This time, Z told her something about himself that she'd never known.

His name.

When he'd whispered it to her, her heart fluttered, although she couldn't begin to tell why. They had been locked in embrace, surrounded by his wings, curled together on her bed as always, and he'd held her as she cried, and corrected her, after she called him Z, that he was _Sora_.

Sora, like wings, meant freedom. Well, literally, it meant "sky", the color of his eyes, but to her the sky had no limits.

It had been only weeks later, a time when Kairi was in the habit of comforting Riku, who was being taunted for his new, out-of-the-closet status, instead of Sora comforting Kairi, that they kissed. Not like the chaste, cheek kisses of younger days. Sora had fallen in love with Kairi at some point during the fifteen years of her life, and she had fallen in love in return. The scorching heat of their kiss probably could have blistered them, but it didn't.

A guardian can only be seen and touched by one person in the entire world. This person is the child they guard, play with, and guide. When an angel follows their child down the school hallway, they slip straight though other children, adults, even walls if they so choose. But they can always touch their child, to render comfort or support, at least until the child ceases to believe in their angel.

Kairi never stopped believing, and for that she was thankful. When her hand hung limp at her side, she was really holding his hand. When she slept in class, as rare as the occasions were, her body was covered by a wing. When they were alone, she could kiss him, be kissed, caressed.

They both thought they were probably breaking insane numbers of rules, but then again, not many children remembered, let alone loved, their guardian from childhood into adulthood.

When Kairi was sixteen, they both became very grateful that an angel can touch his or her charge. After the fact, they lay naked in the warm space between his wings and glowed in their love for one another. For her, it didn't feel all that great, even hurt a little, for him, it was too new to be totally good, but they both cherished the closeness between them.

Many boys at school had decided, by the time Kairi turned eighteen, that she was either lesbian like her ex-boyfriend, or a prude.

She was neither, actually, but you can't tell the world that you're having sex with your guardian angel, now can you?

When she was twenty, studying at college, she earned a reputation for being a staunch supporter of gay rights, and also a determined bachelorette. No man could date her, and after a while, most men no longer wanted to.

At twenty five, she was still single. Her parents both thought it was trauma from her only boyfriend turning out to be gay. They recommended therapy, counciling. They don't want to hear, nor does Kairi want to tell, that she spends every night in the arms of the same man. Sora laughed at them sometimes, fondly. He'd seen everything there was to see or know about the girl, and her enforced, extended apparent singledom had nothing to do with trauma.

For years and years, they endured together. Kairi loving her angel, the angel loving Kairi. One day, when the sky was gray and pink in the morning light, Kairi smiled at her lover's wings, ran her fingers over them, and died. Sora met her, and together they went on.

So Kairi knew many people. She loved many people. But the one being she loved most wasn't a person.

xXx

Parting Comments: Corn-fest, '10. Yes, I know.

This is my first KH fanfic since a disastrous mess I wrote some odd years ago, which had been burnt, never to see the light of day again. This is much better.

Hugs and Kisses,

Eden


End file.
